About Molly
Molly Jorden is an emerging designer and preservationist in the field of architecture, who intends to officially call herself an architect before year’s end. Conservation of historic resources and the traditions and techniques that shape them has always been at the heart of Molly’s architectural pursuits. As the daughter of a flight attendant, she developed a taste for travel at an age when a crayon was more appropriate than a camera as a tool to capture the world she observed. Molly believes wholeheartedly that the craftsmanship and beauty of well-designed architecture lies in the process as much as the product. While she now prefers watercolor, graphite, or oil paint to colored wax, Molly has unfailingly insisted on maintaining the essential skill of hand drafting and rendering as part of the architectural process throughout her university and professional careers.
Molly’s Notre Dame undergraduate thesis project, A School for Traditional Building Craft in Cincinnati, earned her the ICAA Trumbauer Award and the Gertrude S. Sollitt Prize for Architectural Structure. Together, they celebrate Molly’s philosophy of traditional design working in harmony with the craft of assembly to preserve and produce beautiful architecture that promotes sustainability through durability. Since graduating, Molly has had the opportunity to draw and paint professionally and to bring those images to life in built form through new design, preservation, and adaptive reuse informed by traditional and classical global precedent. Outside of the office, a weekly mail exchange of sketches with a friend and former classmate keeps Molly disciplined in the good habit of frequent sketching.